The great thing about traveling around the world for a year without a plan is that you can make it us as you go. On our first night in South Africa, I found myself flipping through a National Geographic that was left on a coffee table at our backpackers. There was a feature on the Okavango Delta, with beautiful photos of elephants pushing through marshy waters at sunset. That’s something I’d like to see, I thought.

The Okavango Delta is in Botswana, huh? Oh, and hey, look at the map! Botswana is right next door to South Africa! That’s pretty much exactly how we decided to go.

For a country right next door to South Africa, Botswana is very much a different place. Parts of it matched up exactly with my preconceptions of what an African country would be like (the bus system, the sounds of the spoken languages) and some of it surprised me (3G cellular service, safety.)

A few days before we were set to leave South Africa, we met a couple Canadian girls in Pretoria that were volunteering in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, for a few months (Hi, Brandy! Hi, Angela!) They offered to let us stay with them at their volunteer house for a couple nights, which was awesome for a number of reasons, not least of which being that we had a couple unofficial guides that had already figured out many of the ins and outs of Botswana society. Their initial help with things like the bus rank were invaluable.

The Bus Rank

When we saw the bus rank for the first time, I thought, now we’re in Africa!